Aid To Municipalities May Be Set Next Week

House Speaker Thomas D. Ritter Friday promised that the legislature will act soon -- maybe by late next week -- to write a formula to distribute $85 million in new state aid to cities and towns.

The money will come from the state's share of slot-machine revenues at the Mashantucket Pequot Indians' casino in Ledyard. The budget awaiting action in the House Tueday would allocate $85 million in each of the next two years to an as-yet unspecified local grant program.

"Our goal is to get this done as soon as possible, because this is the last item our cities and towns need to know when they do their budgets," said Ritter, a Hartford Democrat.

Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. suggested in his budget proposal that $100 million be distributed through formulas that compensate local governments for not taxing state-owned property and private colleges and hospitals.

The problem with the governor's formulas, as many legislators' saw it, was that they sent large grants to some fairly wealthy towns, such as Fairfield and Farmington, while giving comparatively little to Bridgeport, by most measures the state's most depressed city.

Ritter said the legislature's approach definitely will be different from Weicker's, but exactly what it will be has not been decided.

The state statutes contain several grant formulas for programs that have run out of money during the state budget crisis. One of those formulas could be used intact, Ritter said, or an old formula could be amended to bring about what the Democratic leaders regard as a fair result.

"There's a general sense in the House that it's got to be for distressed municipalities," he said.

That would entitle Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford and some other troubled urban areas to bigger grants than suburban and rural towns.

The existing formulas are based on socioeconomic data -- population density, the amount of public housing, per-capita income and real estate values -- that should tilt the results toward the preferred targets.

The speaker's hometown of Hartford would have made out gloriously under Weicker's formula, getting about three times as much money as Bridgeport. Ritter said he is determined that the final formula not produce anomalous results like that.

In a related development, Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim complained to reporters that the state budget, expected to pass the House next week, would "whack Bridgeport."

He said his tentative city budget has a $10 million gap, which he said the legislature should fill by giving it a sizable Pequot grant and by defeating a plan to make cities pay a higher share of general-assistance welfare costs.

Ganim said he cannot raise local taxes because they're too high already and much of the city's population is out of work.

"You can't keep kicking the dog here," Ganim said. "There's no way they should be balancing the state budget on the backs of the Bridgeport taxpayer."

Although the budget includes a $12.5 million increase in education aid to Bridgeport, Ganim said that's useless to him because it has to be spent on schools. The city also needs money to hire police officers, he said